Category Archives: standard language

The vogue word ‘pellucid’ is used by the half-educated to describe books such as these — or the even more tired ‘seminal’. This work is neither. It is humbug.

Dalrymple writes that pedagogically, disapproval of standard grammar

has become almost an orthodoxy.

A very smelly one.

In his preposterous book The Language Instinct (1994), the popular scientist and purveyor of pap Steven Pinker argues that, because all forms of human language have their rules, a standard language is, as Dalrymple puts it,

only a language with an army and a navy, as it were.

Whatever else may be said of this view, says Dalrymple,

it is certainly socially conservative in its effects.

Dalrymple points out that to discourage impoverished children from learning a standard language

is to ensure (unless they become sportsmen or the like) that they remain impoverished for the rest of their lives, not only economically but most likely in intellect.